(Reuters) Roughly one in three Americans say the former security contractor who leaked details of top-secret U.S. surveillance activity is a patriot and should not be prosecuted, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday. Some 23 percent of those surveyed said former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a traitor while 31 percent said he is a patriot. Another 46 percent said they did not know. Snowden, 29, revealed last week that the NSA is monitoring a wide swath of telephone and Internet activity as part of its counterterrorism efforts. "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American," Snowden told the South China Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, in an interview published on Wednesday. U.S. authorities have said they are weighing possible criminal charges against Snowden, who was an employee of Virginia-based consultant Booz Allen Hamilton when he leaked documents indicating the NSA's surveillance of Americans is much broader than had been disclosed publicly. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 35 percent of those surveyed said Snowden should not face charges while 25 percent said he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Another 40 percent said they did not know. Snowden told the South China Post he intends to stay in Hong Kong and fight any effort to extradite him to the United States to face legal action. The online survey of 645 Americans was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday. It has a credibility interval of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points for each result. Eric Snowden